Whenever I read a book that everyone[7]else[8]seems[9] to have liked[10], and that I can’t stand, I wonder if the source of the problem is me or the book. Lucky Jim makes very little sense to me as either academic farce, or as simply a good story.

Perhaps my problem with Lucky Jim is that Jim’s world as a “lecturer”, and the university in which he is insecurely employed, feels so wrong. Neither Jim’s job, or the institution in which he works, align with how I understand the role of faculty (however tenuous) or universities. Does Jim have a PhD? Is he on an academic path as we understand it today, or did that path look different in postwar Britain?

That nothing much happens in Lucky Jim is not the problem. What seems much worse is that what did happen was not all that interesting. Could it be that my 21st sensibilities have made me insensitive to the charms of Lucky Jim. (The book and the protagonist?). Have my expectations for humorous novels devolved to a point of little patience for pages of dialogue amongst unappealing characters?

Even as I was bored by Lucky Jim as a whole, there were moments where I could glimpse why everyone seems to think this a work of genius. The many faces that Jim makes - his Eskimo and Martian-invader and lemon-sucking faces - are certainly evocative. I think I’d like to have heard the Merrie England lecture at the heart of the novel, although do we really know what Jim actually said before passing out? And Amis’ descriptions of the effects of a hangover could only come from deep personal experience.